Jesus

by James Martin

  In a sense, the demons—who asked to be cast into the pigs—are the agents of their own destruction. Nonetheless, Jesus is shown as the quietly powerful one who liberates the man from what had kept him bound. Also, in contrast to the terrifying rantings of the man, Jesus speaks few words and, having recently fallen asleep on the boat, is an emblem of calm—in the midst of storms both physical and emotional. Mark may also want readers to see the destructive power of the demons as mirroring the destructive power of the sea, which figures into the previous passage. Both have now been decisively conquered by Jesus.

  News of Jesus’s astonishing feat is told by the swineherds both in the city and in the country. Some time afterward people returned to see the man “clothed and in his right mind.” No longer naked (which we can infer from the “clothed” comment) and no longer deranged, he is restored to the community. No longer living among the tombs, he is symbolically restored to life. In most translations, onlookers are described now as “afraid.” But the original Greek (ephobēthēsan) also conveys the sense of being awestruck by the power of Jesus.

  Strangely, having been witness to a stunning miracle, the people plead (parakalein again) for Jesus to leave the area. It is the opposite of the request of the demons, who ask if they can stay. Why is this? On one hand, the swineherds were probably angered by the loss of their revenue. On the other hand, people in the pagan region might have been terrified by this Jewish wonder-worker’s power. (Not to mention the sight of two thousand pigs floating in the water.) We’ll return to that question.

  Later, as Jesus is boarding the boat to return to the western shore, the former demoniac returns. The man begs (parekalei) Jesus if he can “be with him.” It’s easy to conjure up a quiet scene, with the water placidly lapping at the sides of the boat, a striking contrast to the turbulent episode that has just happened. Violence has been replaced by peace.

  As in many cases, the man is not called to be a conventional disciple, that is, to leave everything behind. Instead, Jesus says, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.” The man is restored not just to the community at large, but more specifically to his friends. He is sent with a mission: to tell the story. There is a practical aspect to this command as well. Jesus commissions the man to spread the Good News to his people. Mark tells us that in this area, called the Decapolis—a federation of ten cities east of Samaria and Galilee—the story of Jesus’s power spread.

  For the readers of Mark’s Gospel—who were both Jewish and Gentile Christians—the tale of Jesus’s first interaction in pagan lands would have been an especially important lesson. And for the next generation of Christians, the story would have been used as a reminder of Jesus’s outreach to those in non-Jewish communities. His power has no boundaries. Neither does his love.

  Mark ends his story eloquently: Kai pantes ethaumazon. And all were amazed. All marveled. All were astonished.

  SISTER TÉLESFORA GAVE US the name of the town now associated with the Gerasene demoniac, Kursi, on the “other side” of the Sea of Galilee, opposite from Capernaum. In Talmudic texts it was called Kurshi and identified with pagan worship. It is only about five hundred meters east of the sea, which would make rushing into the sea easier for the frenzied pigs.

  George and I weren’t sure what would greet us in Kursi, since so few people had mentioned the town to us. Plus, there was the devilishly complex problem of authenticity, as I mentioned. Like other scholars Murphy-O’Connor points out that the three different names for the place (the “land of the Gerasenes, Gadaranes, Gergesenes”) are “suspicious,” which means that it is difficult to claim that any one place is authentic.14 But in this place, more than at any other site we visited, any questions of authenticity seemed to vanish.

  We drove one afternoon to a site devoid of visitors. The sole caretaker greeted us and told us to feel free to explore the ruins of the monastery and the surrounding grounds. She told us that we would be able to see where the miracle happened “by standing on a rock behind the monastery.”

  The ruins of Kursi were discovered in 1970, when road work uncovered the walls of a fifth-century church and monastery. Built of a dark gray mottled stone, the complex includes what appears to be community space for the monks, outdoor workspace (including an olive press), and a church with a baptistry. On the floor are dusty mosaics arranged in complicated geometric patterns.

  Though I’m no expert, the presence of a Byzantine monastery seemed to heighten the possibility that from ancient times Kursi was considered the place of the miracle. Later I checked Murphy-O’Connor, and he confirmed my hunch: “The Byzantine date of the material suggests that this was identified as the precise site of the Gospel miracle.”15 (I was pleased that the expert agreed with me!)

  We wandered around the monastic ruins and examined the mosaics. I wondered aloud where the view of the famous hillside would be. But as we exited the site, the hills immediately—euthus—loomed up, so close it seemed that we could almost touch them. The dusty brown hillsides were dotted with trees and low bushes, and higher up—easily seen with the naked eye—were the caves, or tombs, that pockmarked the landscape. “Just like I pictured it,” said George.

  Scholarly controversies aside, everything fit. The topography lent itself to the Gospel story. The tombs were far enough up the mountainside that the poor man would have felt a sense of distance and isolation. It would have been easy for people to avoid the terrifying man living on the hillside, but the tombs were not so far that the people wouldn’t have heard the man’s shrieks. I could picture the pigs rooting around on the gentle slopes, and it was easy to visualize the herd rushing into the sea. The sea level was higher in antiquity (modern-day irrigation has caused a drop in the level), and so the distance between the scrubby hillside and the shoreline would have been shorter than it is today.

  The wind blew strongly while we stood there in silence, the only pilgrims. All at once, I could see in my mind’s eye, and almost hear, the thundering herd rushing headlong to the sea.

  George and I stood there for some time. A rickety metal staircase attached to the side of the mountain allowed visitors to go closer to the tombs. I knew that the story meant a great deal to George, so I withdrew to allow him to pray in the mountains and near the tombs.

  WHO HASN’T FELT LIKE the demoniac at some point? In fact, as I was writing this book, I reviewed the journals I kept during my annual retreats to refresh my memory of experiences in meditating on certain Gospel passages. And on the first page of the first journal, begun only a few months after entering the novitiate, I scribbled some notes about my “demons.” At age twenty-eight, I was just beginning to explore my interior life in earnest and to understand how God was trying to free me:

  I still have many demons lurking in me. Despite God’s best efforts, fear, anxiety, and worry still hide within me, and make their appearance at very inopportune times—like the beginning of a retreat. Unfortunately, all of them are very real. Fear of getting sick, anxiety over what would happen if I did get sick, in general worrying.

  At the time, I was consumed with worry over an upcoming stay in Kingston, Jamaica, where I would work among the poor as part of my Jesuit training. Never having spent time in the developing world, I was terrified of contracting some rare illness. These were my demons at the time, and I begged God to rid me of them.

  At various points early in my Jesuit training, I grew so frustrated with the things that so obviously kept me bound, kept me unfree, that I would lie on the floor, asking God to “rid me” of my demons. It sounds overwrought, but I was growing increasingly aware of the unhealthy parts of my personality that made me into a fearful and anxious person. I would beg Jesus to heal me now. Lying on the floor, I would wait for instantaneous healing, like that received by the Gerasene demoniac. It was easy for me to feel like the demoniac. And I could hear his cries in my own.

  It is also easy to see signs of “demons” in others, particularl
y those who engage in long-term, sometimes lifelong, self-destructive behavior. I have several friends who have been alcoholics, overeaters, and addicted to drugs; a few friends have faced long-term emotional problems. They aren’t evil of course, but all of them longed to be freed from their “demons.” In their own ways, they cried out in pain, not so differently from the demoniac centuries ago.

  The Gospel story suggests that some of the possessed man’s friends and family may have tried to help him. Perhaps the chains were used not so much to prevent him from harming others as from harming himself. Generally in the New Testament those close to possessed persons try to seek healing for them. But some of his family and friends, and others in the land of the Gerasenes who did not know him, probably avoided the terrifying man, compounding his sense of isolation.

  It is often the same in our lives. Self-destructive behavior can be frightening, and people withdraw out of fear of being harmed; they also withdraw because they are afraid of what someone else’s torment might reveal about their own lives. Many of us would prefer not to recognize that we too contain a “legion” of demons that seem to have power over us. So we avoid the people on those mountainsides.

  It is likewise frightening to confront your own powerlessness. How painful it is to see someone you love harm himself or herself. How much we want liberation for the person. But how impotent we often feel when we try to help them, when we look for some way in which to heal them.

  In the story of the Gerasene demoniac, the man’s family and friends seem far away. Unlike in other situations, there is no mother or father to beg Jesus for healing. There is no group of friends to carry the man to Jesus’s house and lower him through the roof. Perhaps the demoniac’s friends have stopped attempting to help him after many years of trying in vain. Or perhaps they are like people today who, in the interests of self-preservation, pull away from the person who is bent on self-destruction. A man who is father to several children may want to help his troubled brother, but his first responsibility is to the welfare of his own children. So he withdraws from his brother and his “demons.”

  This is understandable. Often families and friends are encouraged by professional counselors to pull away from “toxic” personalities; in some cases this may be the only way that the family and friends can maintain their own mental health. The friends and family of the Gerasene demoniac probably tried various methods of healing—they may have already taken him to exorcists. But nothing worked, and now the man was left alone. “No one had the strength to subdue him” also means “no one could help him.”

  Maybe that’s why he has become so self-destructive, “bruising himself with stones.” Others reject him, so he rejects himself further. The man’s physical strength is also an indicator of the implacability, the persistence, and the rootedness of the demonic presence.

  As in the Gospel story, only God has the power to liberate fully. And, as in the Gospel story, we need to name our own demons—we need to say, “I am vain” or “I am greedy” or “I have this addiction” in order to open ourselves to healing. Naming or acknowledging our sinful patterns is the first step to healing.

  In my own life, I began to be freed from my demons after years of retreats, spiritual direction, psychotherapy, conversations with friends, hard work, and grace. Of course I’m not fully free; my gradual healing has not been as dramatic, nor as complete, as the healing of the Gerasene demoniac. But Jesus the Liberator always calls us to new life—to come out of our tombs.

  Such healing is often performed with great calm. Often I see Jesus’s calm response to the loud, even violent behavior of the man reflected in the eyes of the best spiritual directors. When I have spat out my worst demons in their presence, they have reacted with that same imperturbable calm. The calm itself is a kind of healing.

  Still, it’s hard to seek out healing. The turmoil that we see in the man, the divided heart that we witness, parallels our being torn between not wanting to spend another moment with our demons and fearing the means by which we might be healed. What would I have to do to be healed? Will it be painful? Yet if we take a chance, emerge from our tombs, prostrate ourselves before God—not in a subservient way, but in a way that acknowledges God to be our “higher power”—and ask for healing, God can free us.

  God’s healing power is also frightening. Sometimes we act like the swineherds of the region. Rather than desiring to be with the one who heals, we ask him to leave. Now, on a literal level, the swineherds may simply have been infuriated by the death of their pigs; Jesus had just made it more difficult for them to earn a living. But on an allegorical level, the swineherds represent all those who fear change, even for the good. They stand for all those who fear leaving the tombs.

  AS I WAS WRITING this chapter, it dawned on me that during our time in Kursi, I hadn’t asked George what was so meaningful to him about the Gerasene demoniac; I didn’t want to intrude on his meditations. So I wrote him to ask.

  George said the passage was one of the two key experiences of prayer that he had during his Long Retreat, also known as the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, a four-week retreat that invites a person into the life of Jesus through imaginative prayer. Jesuits make the Spiritual Exercises at least twice—once as a young novice and later at the end of their training. My friend’s experience with this story during his novitiate would continue to “shape and define” his life as a Jesuit over the next twenty-five years. During that retreat, George wrote in his journal:

  Jesus invited me to look into the tombs all around me, the cemetery of bad memories that I chose to dwell in most times. And what was there? Nothing, just dust and dry bones—the fears and pains I am most afraid of are dead things. They cannot hurt me anymore. They are dead and I am alive.

  George did not know that he would soon enter a two-year period of depression that he described as the most painful time of his life. It began when he stopped using alcohol to numb his feelings. Over time and with some help from his brother Jesuits, caring counselors, and “friends in recovery,” he was finally able to “get up out of the tomb” he was living in and “begin to live again.” The “gift of depression,” as he called it, has helped him to connect with the men and women he has ministered to as a prison chaplain. I’ll let him end this chapter in his own words:

  Their prison cells are like that dark tomb, and I know from my own experience how terrifying and lonely that tomb feels. But I also know that Jesus called me from the darkness just as powerfully as he called the tormented man in Gerasa from the tombs in which he was trapped. Prison ministry has been for me a way of witnessing to the power of God to free us from ourselves—from the shame and hurts and traumas and resentments we have endured, to real freedom, to what Alcoholics Anonymous calls the Sunlight of the Spirit.

  * * *

  THE GERASENE DEMONIAC

  Mark 5:1–20

  (See also Matthew 8:28–34; Luke 8:26–39)

  * * *

  They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain; for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion; for we are many.” He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; and the unclean spirits begged him, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.” So he gave them pe
rmission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the lake, and was drowned in the lake.

  The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came to see what it was that had happened. They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid. Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it. Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood. As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. But Jesus refused, and said to him, “Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.” And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  Tabgha

  “And all ate and were filled.”

  ON OUR VERY FIRST day in Galilee, after the four-hour, lost-in-the-desert drive from Jerusalem, and as soon as we checked into the Franciscan hostel, we rushed out to see where Jesus had been.

  George and I piled back into the car, took out the map, and set our sights for the nearest holy site, easily accessible by the highway that encircles the Sea of Galilee. In five minutes we reached Tabgha, one of the most important sites in Galilee, the traditional location for the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. Its name is a variant of the Greek Heptapegon, meaning “Place of the Seven Springs.” Nearby, seven freshwater springs flow into the sea, marking where Jesus is said to have called the first disciples.